Hello! Welcome to What'sWhat. This video we have included a crazy fact about how sunglasses from your favorite brands like PRADA, VERSACE, GUCCI, RAYBAN, DOLCE & GABANNA and so many more are actually all made by just one company-LUXOTTICA. Another major player is Essilor which dominates a wide portion of the spectacles industry. And now after their merger, it's a big event to put our eyes on. The merger of Essilor Luxottica. #luxottica #eywearbusiness #surprisingfactaboutsunglasses
The lenses in half of our glasses are most likely made by Essilor, a French multinational that controls almost half of the world’s prescription lens business and has acquired more than 250 other companies in the past 20 years.
Meanwhile, there is a good chance that your frames are made by Luxottica, an Italian company with an unparalleled combination of factories, designer labels, and retail outlets. You wear Giorgio Armani, Bulgari, Burberry, Chanel, Coach, Dolce & Gabbana, DKNY, Michael Kors, Polo Ralph Lauren, Paul Smith Spectacles, Prada, Ralph Lauren, Tiffany & Co., Versace: there is one surprising fact about these sunglasses. The thing is all of those are made by one manufacturer -- Luxottica. Starting off as a tiny Italian glasses company, today, Luxottica makes frames and sunglasses for an amazing list of brands and stores you can think of. Many powerful names such as Ray-Ban or Vogue or Prada or Oliver Peoples or even the big retailers like SunGlass Hut, you name them and they are all owned by Luxottica. Luxottica controls 80% of the major brands in the $28 billion global eyewear business.
This is of course why they can charge you $200 for a piece of plastic with two hinges. They are an interesting monopoly. They are them. It also means that if anyone ever came up with a mind control chip you could put into glasses, they could have half of the world enslaved within months.
Essilor, the biggest manufacturer of lenses in the world, has now merged with Italy's Luxottica, the world's leading consumer eyewear group. The EU and the US gave permission for the world’s largest optical companies to form a single corporation, which is known as EssilorLuxottica. Essilor currently has around 45% of the prescription lenses market, and Luxottica 25% of the frames. The new entity will be worth around $50bn, sell close to a billion pairs of lenses and frames every year, and have a workforce of more than 1,40,000 people. EssilorLuxottica intends to dominate “the visual experience” for decades to come.
Around 1.4 billion of us today, rely on their products. Last year, the two companies had a combined customer base that is somewhere between Apple’s and Facebook’s, but with none of the hassle of being well known.
With this merger under role, Ellisor Luxottica will now have full control over the pricing of a huge variety of different brands giving consumers merely the illusion of choice rather than the choice itself, and extracting a lot of money from them in the process. Looks like this is how the world’s interesting monopolies play their economics.
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